Chronic use of benzodiazepines and cognitive deficit complaints: A risk factor study

Abstract

Benzodiazepines produce an anterograde amnesia after acute administration but whether their chronic use is hazardous to memory processes remains unclear. The present study analyses the risk of increasing cognitive complaints with chronic benzodiazepine use. Subjects seeking medical assistance at the General Internal Medicine Outpatient Clinic of Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre, were interviewed before seeing physicians. They were asked about use of benzodiazepines, history of neurological and psychiatric diseases, use of alcohol, and deficits in remembering and learning as well as age, sex and level of education. Age (over 51 years), low level of education, a history of neurological and psychiatric diseases and use of benzodiazepines showed significant associations with cognitive complaints. After a conditional logistic regression analysis, benzodiazepine use lost its association with memory complaints. These data support the hypothesis that the chronic use of benzodiazepines does not carry a risk for cognitive deficits complaints.

Diagnosing dementia and normal aging: clinical relevance of brain ratios and cognitive performance in a Brazilian sample

“…They answered a call for healthy subjects over the age of 50 for the present study. The subjects were submitted to a standardized interview (11) and examination for the determination of their medical, neurological and psychiatric conditions. Subjects selected after complete evaluation were submitted to a CT scan without administration of intravenous contrast (12).…”

“…We used the same technique to analyze the association of cognitive performance with dementia, whose cutoffs were previously studied for detection of dementia produced by organic diseases (i.e., Alzheimer, vascular, Parkinson, etc.) (11). We applied a multiple parallel strategy for test positivity (50% + 1 tests should be positive, i.e., below cutoff) to identify positive individuals for cognitive deficit (11,35).…”

“…(11). We applied a multiple parallel strategy for test positivity (50% + 1 tests should be positive, i.e., below cutoff) to identify positive individuals for cognitive deficit (11,35). The association observed by this method was higher, as also was the odds ratio ( Table 7).…”

Cognitive effects of benzodiazepine use: a review

“…These authors argue a strong relationship between the sedative and amnesic effects of benzodiazepines suggesting that as patients become tolerant to the sedative effects, memory deficits are no longer apparent. Chaves, Bianchin, Peccin, and Rotta (1993), in their large study on the cognitive deficits in 366 past and present benzodiazepine users, found that the best predictors of memory complaints were age over 51 years, low education level, history of neurological or psychiatric disease, and use of benzodiazepines. After adjusting for these variables through a regression analysis, benzodiazepine use was no longer associated with memory complaints (Chaves et al, 1993).…”

Self‐report of memory and affective dysfunction in association with medication use in a sample of individuals with chronic sleep disturbance

“…While the negative eects on new learning and memory have been quite reliably demonstrated with acute administration of benzodiazepines (Block and Berchou, 1984;Patat et al, 1987;Netter, 1988;Vidailhet et al, 1994;Coull et al, 1999), the literature on the eects of chronic use is sparse. While some studies have reported impairments on certain tests of immediate and delayed recall (Lister et al, 1988;Rummas et al, 1993;Tata et al, 1994), others have failed to show an association (Lucki et al, 1986;Chaves et al, 1993;Kilic et al, 1999).…”